Category: Driving Progress

With the tremendous growth happening in Central Texas, the demand for an integrated transit system continues to increase. And yet, like most projects of this scale, there are many challenges to creating a system that works best for riders across the region. As the largest public transportation provider in the region, Capital Metro is taking the lead to address these challenges, but it will take creativity and strong partnerships to meet the needs of our rapidly growing community.

Understanding Our Service Area

“Essentially the Central Texas area we’d like to serve is 4,000 square miles, but the area we can officially serve is just 520 square miles,” says Todd Hemingson, Vice President of Strategic Planning and Development for Capital Metro. “And it’s not necessarily the 520 square miles Central Texas needs it to be.” It’s important to understand that Capital Metro operates within a limited service area including Austin, Jonestown, Lago Vista, Leander, Manor, Point Venture, San Leanna, Volente, and portions of Travis County and Williamson County, including the Anderson Mill area. These member jurisdictions voted to join Capital Metro and to support it with a portion of the sales tax collected in those areas. Continue reading “Serving More Central Texans with an Integrated Transit System”→

Capital Metro has partnered with other transit agencies in the central Texas region, like the City of Austin, CAMPO and the Lone Star Rail District to create a plan for regional high-capacity transit.

What would that look like?

Imagine a series of components like urban rail, commuter rail (like MetroRail), Rapid service, and express lanes where all services support one another in a network, easing access throughout the region.

Sounds nice, right? Well, it looks even better. Check out this detailed vision map with all the system elements to help you share our vision for how to create a connected central Texas.

We’ve crunched all the numbers for 2012, and here’s the bottom line: Capital Metro knocked it out of the park in 2012.

During 2012, we provided an average 112,000 rides each weekday—enough passengers to completely fill both the Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and Disch-Falk Field combined.

The proof that central Texans are choosing Capital Metro as a preferred way to get around lies in our numbers–in 2012 we provided over 34 million boardings–more trips than the population of Texas!

Across the nation, more people are turning to public transit as the preferred transportation choice, but Capital Metro’s growth rate far exceeds the national trend. Here at home, our fixed-route bus ridership is boasting a 22-month growth streak, and MetroRail ridership has tripled in two years.

See the growth in our bus ridership for yourself–2011 compared to 2012 below:

2012 was a big year for MetroRail too! We’ve got more people riding the rails every single day with an average 2,200 boardings each weekend.

In 2012, MetroRail hit a milestone of its one millionth passenger trip, and ridership increased nearly 50 percent in 2012 over 2011.

Rail’s popular! See the ridership spike:

Capital Metro made progress in 2012 by analyzing service and making changes towards creating a more efficient system.

Going into 2013, we’re excited to keep driving progress by working hard at planning for the region’s future with high-capacity transit solutions, like MetroRapid, that will move more people at less cost and with less impact to the environment.

We are also focused on the regional planning effort, Project Connect, that has developed a high-capacity transit vision to keep all of us in Central Texas moving and connected.

How are we driving progress? Check out this super sweet video that breaks it down: